childhood and school time

 

Childhood and School-Time

Book 1: Introduction

Summary and Analysis

It is a powerful autumn day. The poet has, by his own account, been too long pent-up in London and only now has managed to return to the beloved Lake District where he spent his childhood and adolescence. It’s difficult to repair his age because the poem opens because time constantly shifts backwards and forward throughout the narrative. The beginning of Book 1 finds Wordsworth speaking from a mature point of view. The body of the poem employs flashbacks to explain the event of the poetic mind during youth. This material is amalgamated with the poet's adult views of philosophy and art (those views held during the writing and endless revision of The Prelude, roughly from 1799 until 1850).

Wordsworth experiences relief in returning to nature. He immediately identifies spiritual freedom with the absence of the encumbrances of civilization. Feelings of irresponsible freedom and lack of purpose quickly subside to a prevision of an impending period of optimism and creativity. Within the delicious quiet, Wordsworth suddenly sees in his imagination the cottage of the landlady with whom he stayed as a schoolboy. He recalls that even then he had intimations of his future greatness.
His wish to make some profound work of art involves a re-disciplining of his mind, which has recently been dulled by the artificiality of society. He mentions en passant the standard moodiness of the poet in likening him to a devotee. In assessing his faculties, Wordsworth finds he has the three necessary ingredients for creativity: an important soul; knowledge of the underlying principles of things; and a number of painstaking observations of natural phenomena. He rejects historical and martial themes, also as mere anecdotes from his personal history. He’s searching instead for "some philosophic song that cherishes our lifestyle." he's next assailed by doubts about the maturity of his views. If such views change radically after he has recorded them, his analysis of them is going to be worthless. In his indecision, he feels that if he reviews the ideas he formed in childhood and traces their history up until early manhood, he will find whether or not they have had any lasting truth and permanence.
He recollects a number of his childhood activities, among them river-bathing (he sported sort of a naked savage) and climbing and robbing of birds' nests while wandering in the dark. During a discussion of straightforward education, he stresses the importance of reaction on the part of the kid to each action upon it by its natural environment. In this way, nature develops morality within the child. Wordsworth sets the tone of the poem by speaking religiously of nature. He sees it as an excellent and awesome intelligence. Occasionally he communicates his mood to the reader by employing natural objects as symbols of his feelings.
In a celebrated passage crammed with many colours, the poet describes how as a youth he stole a ship and rowed one night across Ullswater Lake. At the climax of this experience, he imagined that a peak beyond the lake became a presence that reared up and menaced him due to his misdeed in taking the boat. He confides that for a few times thereafter he struggled to clarify a conception of pantheism that had been teasing his brain. He addresses what he terms the spirit of the universe. He decries the artefacts of civilization and praises enduring things — life and nature.

In a more literal section, he tells of his youthful pastimes and mentions winter ice games with a gaggle of companions and games of cards and tick-tack-toe ahead of the peat fire. But in particular, he tried to be outdoors in the least times of the year in order that nature might be unstinting in its education of him. He’s particularly troubled when he remembers that certain vistas in Westmoreland — particularly the ocean — brought him great pleasure, though he had no prior experience of an equivalent quite a joy. Since beauty is eternal, he may have learned to like such sights during the previous existence of his soul. He then proceeds to develop a roman1tic theory of aesthetics. He maintains that certain individuals create great art because, within the midst of mundane events, they sense the magical urgency in everyday objects. Insignificant things combat a critical meaning over and above their common and instrument. They suggest to the practitioner of the fine arts, the clergyman, and therefore the idealistic philosopher that the universe is of vast and harmonious design. The layman, on the opposite hand, is insensible to the present oneness of all things, and therefore the idea must be communicated to him.